The Story of Kylie in 20 Songs

As Australia’s queen of pop returns home to kick off her Tension world tour—just in time for Sydney’s Mardi Gras—we’re celebrating the resilience, reinventions and fearlessness that have fuelled Kylie’s glittering decades on the dance floor.

When Kylie Minogue introduced herself to the pop world with her high-energy version of Little Eva’s “The Locomotion”in 1987, it was just the start of a long and shapeshifting music career. At that point, the artist born Kylie Ann Minogue on 26 May 1968 was best known as an actor, thanks to her role as plucky mechanic Charlene Robinson in Neighbours. She had some singing experience—in 1986, she appeared on TV show Young Talent Time performing Eurythmics & Aretha Franklin’s “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” with her sister Dannii (they would reunite on the disco-influenced “100 Degrees” from 2015’s Kylie Christmas)—and it soon became clear that, far from an opportunistic benefit of her TV fame, music was her No. 1 priority. As she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2020, it was a passion that stretched back to her early years growing up in Melbourne. “I don’t recall having the acting dream when I was younger,” she said. “It was music. I don’t recall having the fame dream either. I think I just wanted to sing.” Certainly her success on Neighbours provided a solid springboard for launching a pop career in Australia and the UK (where the show was also hugely successful), as did her partnership with prolific British production team Stock Aitken Waterman. They wrote and produced early hits such as “I Should Be so Lucky” and “Step Back in Time”, as well as her 1988 duet with fellow Neighbours star Jason Donovan, “Especially for You”. The two were a couple in the show and in real life, and the sugary sweet love song affirmed Kylie’s U-rated girl-next-door image, a foundational quality that’s continued to endear her to a loyal fanbase as her career’s evolved. Though the Kylie that would push pop’s boundaries was still a few years away, her 1990 cover of Little Anthony & The Imperials’ 1958 doo-wop classic “Tears on My Pillow” hinted at an artist willing to think beyond the dance floor, while providing another link to her theatrical background (it featured in the 1989 film The Delinquents, in which Kylie starred).

Just like Madonna, Kylie realised early that to sustain a lengthy career in music she could never stand still creatively or aesthetically. She even poked fun at her multiple identities in the video for 1997’s “Did It Again”, in which Indie Kylie, Dance Kylie, Cute Kylie and Sex Kylie battle each other for superiority. Her first metamorphosis from girl next door to slinky, sexy Kylie came with the club-influenced “Better the Devil You Know” from 1990’s Rhythm of Love, an evolution perhaps not unrelated to the fact she had begun dating one of the world’s most charismatic rock stars, INXS singer Michael Hutchence. Within a couple of years, she’d split from Stock Aitken Waterman and undertook another reinvention as she signed with UK dance label Deconstruction and began experimenting with deeper club sounds and indie music (“Did It Again”). But it was her life-affirming 2000 hit “Spinning Around”—a song that Paula Abdul had originally co-written for a planned album of her own—that put Kylie (and a pair of iconic gold shorts) firmly back on the dance floor and in the charts. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”, the lead song from 2001’s Fever then saw her experiment with electroclash and synths, which she took further on Body Language, with “Slow”. In 2018, the country-leaning Golden signified a further shift, this time to nurse a broken heart. “Golden was more introspective, dealing with stuff,” she told Lowe. “I absolutely loved going to Nashville and having my two weeks there writing. That did mirror my life then in that I was just trying to get back on terra firma, just go, ‘Wow, that was a really human experience I went through that anyone can relate to’, and deal with the breakup, tail between my legs.”

The first time Kylie realised she’d been embraced by the LGBTQ+ community was in the early ’90s while driving down Oxford Street in Darlinghurst, the beating heart (or “Padam Padam”, if you will) of Sydney’s LGBTQ+ population. Passing the legendary gay bar The Albury, she noticed a sign advertising “Kylie Night”, in which punters dressed as their heroine. Beyond the flirty exuberance of dance-floor anthems such as the Village People-esque “Your Disco Needs You” (penned with Guy Chambers and Robbie Williams, and deemed too camp by her UK record label to release as a single), there is a key reason why Kylie has long been a darling of the queer community: it chose her. In her early career, she was never marketed towards that audience but simply imbued her music with a sense of inclusion, joy and love that resonated organically. And Kylie would have been thrilled to be embraced, having admitted it was hard finding a place where she belonged when she transitioned from acting into music. “From my very first single, I was a duck out of water,” she told Apple Music while conducting a track-by-track interview for 2023’s Tension. Her status as an ally has become more visible over the years, whether performing at multiple Pride events (“What Do I Have to Do?” was a centrepiece of her first, the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras) or releasing songs such as the euphoric “All the Lovers”, an anthem whose video featured same-sex kissing that she would refuse to cut. In 2023 meanwhile, “Padam Padam”, ubiquitous at Pride celebrations across the world, became more than just a viral hit—at a time in America when LGBTQ+ rights were increasingly under attack, the song was a beacon of light and joy.

“I certainly love meeting other people, working with other people,” Kylie told Zane Lowe in 2020. “It feels like that’s a great tool to not feel so alone in this wilderness.” Over the years, Kylie has exhibited a fearless and genre-agnostic approach to collaborations, recording with artists as diverse as children’s entertainers The Wiggles (2009’s “Monkey Man”), the godfather of punk Iggy Pop (2015’s “Christmas Wrapping”) and country’s man of mystery, Orville Peck (alongside Diplo on 2024’s “Midnight Ride”). Her first collaboration to turn heads, however, was with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, a band so dark and diametrically opposed to her musically that, on paper, it seemed doomed to fail. Cave, however, was an unlikely fan and wrote 1995’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow” specifically for the pop star. A melancholy murder ballad in which Kylie’s Elisa Day and her killer, voiced by Cave, recount her slaying from their respective points of view, the duet became The Bad Seeds’ biggest hit and a potent example of Kylie’s shapeshifting abilities. More familiar, yet no less effective, was her raunchy duet with Robbie Williams on 2000’s “Kids”, and smooth vocalising atop the upbeat disco-house of Giorgio Moroder’s “Right Here, Right Now” (2015). Though her collaborators may come from disparate parts of the music spectrum, they all have one thing in common—they were attracted to the life, love and light in Kylie’s music, and in her saw an artist with whom they wouldn’t feel “so alone in this wilderness”.

In an interview with Apple Music following the success of “Padam Padam”, it was pointed out to Kylie that this wasn’t the first time she’d delivered a huge smash after time away from the upper reaches of the charts. As for how she managed such comebacks, she said, “It’s determination and belief and it’s inspiration from…just real-life human stories that my music has played a part of. That is so deeply inspiring.” In the same conversation she added, “I’ve been written off that many times. I’ve just had to build…myself, and I can tell you it’s definitely not always been easy.” Of course, any artist with a career that crosses five different decades will be forced to ride the waves of critical and popular opinion, and Kylie is no different. What’s most impressive is her ability to bounce back stronger. Any notion that “The Loco-Motion” was the work of a one-hit wonder evaporated when she followed it up with another smash, “I Should Be so Lucky”. When she split with Deconstruction after 1997’s Impossible Princess and doubts were swirling around her ongoing popularity, she delivered 2000’s “Spinning Around” and, a year later, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”—songs that redefined Kylie as a flirtatious, confident and liberated dance-floor queen, revitalising her career for the new century. More than two decades on, “Padam Padam” achieved a similar feat, that momentum flowing into the release of electro-dance banger “Lights Camera Action”. Although Kylie took time out of the spotlight after her breast cancer diagnosis in 2005, she soon returned, work ethic undimmed, with 2007’s X and its first single “2 Hearts”, which revealed yet another metamorphosis, this time as the queen of glam-rock stomp. In a career built on reinvention and change there is, perhaps, only one certainty: You can never count Kylie Minogue out.